Caruso hazarded a wild guess. “Well, you . . . could make him give you your money back.”
“Money?” Labriola bawled. “A guy don’t do a job for me, I don’t want his fucking money. I want
Caruso nodded briskly. “Sure. Right.” He cautiously lowered his hands. “I see what you mean.”
“So what can you tell me about this guy besides where he works?”
“Which guy?”
“The one you told me about. The one in the bar. What else you know about him?”
Caruso remained silent.
“What else you know, Vinnie?” Labriola repeated. “About the guy at the bar or that other guy who maybe is . . . what’d you call it . . . Spider-Man?”
“Batman.”
“Yeah, him. What else you know?”
“Well . . . nothing.”
“That’s right. Nothing. Which is bad, ’cause I need to know about both these assholes,” Labriola said darkly. “You understand, Vinnie? Where they go. Who they see. All that shit.”
“Yes, sir,” Caruso said lamely. “I’ll find out about them.”
“Make sure you do, because whichever one of these fucks is supposed to find that bitch, if he don’t do it, you got to pop him, Vinnie.”
Caruso felt a surge of excitement. “Pop him, right,” he repeated. “I would have to pop him. And I would too. Whatever you say, Mr. Labriola.”
Labriola seemed not to hear him. Instead, he again focused his gaze on the ravaged neighborhood of his youth, staring at the buildings that lay alongside the expressway as if they weren’t really standing, save as the ruins of some long-forgotten war.
For a time, Caruso watched as Labriola continued to stare out the window. Then he drew his gaze away and stared straight ahead, down a road whose twists and turns had wonderfully delivered him into the Old Man’s trust.
STARK
The material Mortimer had brought lay strewn across the desk. It could hardly have been more useless. Nothing but a picture of a woman in her mid-thirties and a random assortment of more or less incoherent observations, all of them scrawled on legal-size yellow pages in a disjointed handwriting whose legibility strained Stark’s eyes and strengthened his suspicions that there was something in this deal that didn’t quite add up.
As to facts, Stark learned only that the missing Sara was originally from the South, had come to NYC as a young woman, worked as a nightclub singer, met and married the anonymous husband, and “done nothing” since then. She had no children according to this information, no living relatives, and no resources since she’d taken nothing from her husband’s bank accounts.
As to where Sara might have gone, the notes offered no assistance. She had left her car in the driveway, but there was no indication as to whether another party had picked her up, or, if such were the case, who that individual (friend, lover, taxi driver?) might be. She’d also left most of her clothes and all of her jewelry, including both wedding and engagement rings, which indicated that she either had limited means or that she expected her needs to be met by someone other than herself.
The more Stark reviewed the notes, the more useless they seemed. But it was not just the uselessness that bothered him. There was a disturbing look to the notes. The handwriting was an angry scrawl, the angles sharp, the words disjointed. Even on the page they seemed to sputter madly.
He reached for the phone.
“It’s me,” he said when Mortimer answered. “The notes you got from your friend are useless.”
“He’s a little . . . he ain’t . . . open with everything.”
“He’s very angry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen this before, Mortimer.”
“I know you have.”
Mortimer’s answer seemed clipped, as if he were hurrying away, on the run himself in some way, seeking someplace to hide no less desperately than the missing woman.
“I think we need to talk,” Stark said. He waited for Mortimer to offer something that could quell his growing misgivings. Then he said, “My house. Three-thirty.”
“Okay,” Mortimer said weakly.
Stark hung up the phone, returned the notes to the plain manila envelope, and placed the envelope in the top drawer of his desk. He could feel something evil stir around him. It coiled in the fractured handwriting of the notes.
He closed the drawer, walked to the window, parted the thick curtains, and looked out at the street. Years before he’d done the same from his hotel window in Madrid and seen Lockridge standing by a lamppost, smoking, with one hand sunk deep into the right pocket of his black leather jacket, his freckled fingers no doubt caressing the blade he would later use on Marisol.
MORTIMER
Mortimer stared disconsolately at the television. The Yankees were losing, but he didn’t care. He had no money on the game, but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He had bigger fish to fry than a Yankee win, even if he stood to gain a few bucks in the deal. He had bigger fish to fry. A dreadful sense that Stark had caught on to something, the dark edges of the deal.
“You gonna be home for dinner tonight, Morty?”